Weekly Review

Tens of thousands of people signed a petition calling for the impeachment of a judge in Montana who sentenced a man to 60 days in jail for raping his 12-year-old daughter, and a man in California was sentenced to 1,503 years in prison for raping his teenage daughter. A couple at a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Greenville, South Carolina, left their waitress a note telling her “the woman’s place is in the home,” in lieu of a tip. Hundreds of women in yoga pants marched through Barrington, Rhode Island, to defend their right to wear the garment, and Trump vowed to sue every woman accusing him of sexual assault. “I look so forward to doing that,” he said. Read more…

Accusations surfaced that Trump had kissed a former Miss USA contestant, a makeup artist, and a Trump Tower receptionist without their consent; groped a People magazine reporter, a former contestant on his television show, a stranger he was sitting next to at a nightclub, and a stranger sitting next to him in first class on a flight; told a group of 14-year-old girls he would be dating them in “a couple of years”; and entered the dressing rooms of Miss Teen USA contestants while they were changing. Read more…

The Shiyan Lake Ecologic Park in China unveiled its “exciting and adventurous” glass-walled bathrooms, and a public restroom in Virginia was consumed by a sinkhole.Officials in Indiana asked motorists for heightened caution during deer-mating season, and snake catchers in Australia observed a rare snake orgy in an empty pool. In Germany, the seven-year hunt for a man responsible for slashing inflatable backyard pools ended with the arrest of a 27-year-old man, whose apartment also contained multiple inflatable mattresses. “We cannot rule out that the man has some kind of fetish,” said a police spokesman. Read more…

Hackers took control of a digital billboard in Jakarta and played a pornographic film, a church in Western Australia had its windows broken by a gang of children between the ages of four and eight who were armed with small rocks, and a Pittsburgh man was given 30 days to catch a wild rooster on his property before being penalized by the city. “I called the zoo,” the man said in court, “but they said they didn’t have the capabilities to catch a rooster.” Read more…

The president of a Crime Stoppers chapter in Canada was fired for allegedly participating in the cultivation of cannabis, police in Mexico found a van outfitted with a ten-foot-long air cannon used to fire 60-pound bales of marijuana over the U.S. border, and an employee of the Royal Canadian Mint was suspected of having smuggled out an estimated $179,015 in “cookie-sized nuggets” of gold by coating them in Vaseline and hiding them in his rectum. Read more…

In Minnesota, an Islamic State militant dressed as a private security guard stabbed nine people at a shopping mall, before being shot and killed in a Macy’s by an off-duty police officer. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump conceded that U.S. president Barack Obama was born in America, Jane Goodall compared Trump’s behavior to that of male chimpanzees performing dominance rituals, a dead Republican won his primary race for a seat in the New York State Assembly, and a deceased Siamese cat was sent a California voter-registration application in the mail. Read more…

"When Matti invited me on a tour of the neighborhood, I asked about security. 'The message has already been passed to ISIS that you’re here,' he said. 'But don’t worry. I guarantee I could bring even you in and out of the Islamic State.'"

$50,000

The Mall of America hired its first black Santa, a real estate company valued Mr. and Mrs. Claus’s North Pole home at $656,957, and it was reported that the price of the gifts from “Twelve Days of Christmas” went up by more than $200 in 2016, to $34,363.49.

"It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis."